Tuesday morning, as millions of Americans lined up at their polling places to participate in the often quite literally broken democratic process, a new Twitter account tweeted a link to a short manifesto: “today’s voting machines are often insecure, not particularly easy-to-use, and so expensive that they’re often used much longer than they were designed for and election officials are forced to hunt for replacement parts on eBay. The market has failed us.”

The announcement, from a new nonprofit called VotingWorks, ended with a promise to build a “secure, affordable, open-source voting machine” from the ground up. The letter wasn’t signed, but it’s the work of Ben Adida, a software developer who has studied voting machines for more than 20 years and had a PhD from MIT in secure voting.

“I thought this launch would be pretty quiet, I thought it would be buried in the news of the actual election, but already a lot of people have reached out to volunteer to make it happen,” Adida told me on the phone. “It’s super early days, but the response to the announcement shows that people are hungry for this.”

Adida says that VotingWorks plans to use already existing, commodity hardware and open-source software to compete with the proprietary, expensive, and often insecure voting machines that currently dominate the market. He pitches it as an attempt to rethink voting machine from “first principles,” to reconsider what a voting machine is.

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15 Best Free Linux Wiki Engines

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. A Wiki engine is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system. This facilitates web pages being created and edited using a web browser. This type of software is usually implemented as an application server that runs on one or more web servers.
The content is stored in a file system, and changes to the content are typically stored in a relational database management system (such as MySQL), although some simple wiki engines use text files instead.
Wikis try to make it as simple as possible to write and share useful content, using intuitive page naming and text formatting conventions. Wikis are usually (but not always) wide open and assume a cooperating community. However, with spam bots prevalent, most wiki engines have lots of anti-spam measures such as page permissions, Access Control Lists, host blocking, blacklists, and CAPTCHAs in place.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 15 high quality free Linux wiki engines. Hopefully, there will be something of interest for anyone who wishes to share information with others.
Also: Michal Čihař: translation-finder 1.1

Games: Stadia Scepticism, Epic, Linux Gaming Report and More

Yesterday, Google announced plans for a new game-streaming service called Stadia. Besides the logo, the controller, and a single game — Doom Eternal — the announcement left us with more questions than answers. Primary in my mind has been the query of why Google needs to be in the gaming business at all. Isn’t it enough to dominate web search, ads, and browsers, smartphone operating systems, and maps? What part of our lives does Google not want to know about? And then it dawned on me that we might be looking at it from the wrong perspective: what if Stadia isn’t a case of Google aggressively entering a new business sphere, but rather a defensive one to protect its existing kingdom?

I can remember being at E3 in 2000 and being pitched on the idea of a sort of "dumb terminal" for gaming. As in, you wouldn't need a computer or game console in your home, since all of the actual game processing would be accomplished in the cloud then streamed to your TV via broadband. Most of these early pitches never materialized. Initially because cloud computing simply wasn't fully baked yet, but also thanks to America' shoddy broadband.
Cloud-based game streaming is something the industry has continued to push for, though nobody has yet to truly crack the market. Onlive probably tried the hardest, though again a lack of real cloud horsepower and sketchy residential broadband prevented the service from truly taking off.
Undaunted, Google took to the stage at the Game Developers Conference to unveil Stadia, a looming game streaming platform that will let gamers play top-shelf games on any hardware with a Chrome browser. Google insists that the service, when it launches this summer, will be able to drive games at up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second seamlessly between multiple devices with no need for game consoles, high-end PCs, loading times, or installs. The whole presentation is available here:

Last year, Valve announced a hands-off approach to Steam that would allow anything onto the platform “except for things that we decide are illegal, or straight up trolling.” In addition to the Rape Day controversy, that policy has pushed Valve to take hardline stances on content revolving around child exploitation, school shootings, and most recently around tributes memorializing the New Zealand shooter. Sweeney, it seems, does not see the value it trying to protect content that pushes up against that amorphous line.

Jason goes deeper down the rabbit hole by exploring the state of Steam gaming on 9 different Linux distributions. Find out how Fedora compares to Pop!_OS.
Plus, first impressions of Purism’s brand new Librem 15 v4 laptop.

While the Linux version has been up on GOG for a little while, Steam was left a bit behind. Now the Linux version on Steam has been officially announced and released but there's an issue with Steam Play.

Chasm, the crowdfunded adventure platformer continues to see great post-release support with the latest big free update out now.
While it's not a personal favourite of mine (I much prefer Dead Cells honestly), it's still a reasonably good game overall. In fact, it's far better than a lot of action/adventure platformers and it does look great.

Following on from the tweak to Danger Zone to focus more on duos, Valve are still tweaking their Battle Royale mode in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as well as the game as a whole.
Firstly, for Danger Zone you should now see much better queue times for matchmaking. Before this patch, I could easily see queue times around 3 to 5 minutes (often the latter) even with a lot of people online which is not ideal and frankly that makes me (and no doubt others) get bored and look to play something else. Since this patch has dropped, I've played a good 30-40 matches and not a single one has hit even 2 minutes queue time (under 1 minute mostly now!) which is a pretty huge improvement.

Nuvola: Linux Desktop Music Player for Streaming Services

Take a look at features and installation of Nuvola Music Player, a music player for Linux desktop that plays streaming music services.

LibreOffice 6.2.2 Office Suite Released with More Than 50 Fixes, Download Now

While LibreOffice 6.1 is still the recommended version for those who want a more stable and well-tested LibreOffice office suite, LibreOffice 6.2.2 is here for technology enthusiasts and early adopters who want to get a taste of the latest new features and innovations in the free and open-source office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide.
"LibreOffice 6.2.2 represents the bleeding edge in term of features for open source office suites, and as such is not optimized for enterprise-class deployments, where features are less important than robustness. Users wanting a more mature version can download LibreOffice 6.1.5, which includes some months of back-ported fixes.," said Italo Vignoli.

Latest News

OpenShot 2.4.4 Released | Keyframe Scaling, Docking, and More!

I am proud to announce the immediate release of OpenShot 2.4.4, the absolute best version yet! This is going to be a long post, but here is a quick summary for those who are short on time. This release brings huge performance and stability improvements, along with some major bug fixes, lots of polish, and many new features.
Also: OpenShot 2.4.4 Released With Better SVG Rendering, Preview Performance

Daniel Pocock: Don't trust me. Trust the voters.

Any reply in support of my nomination has been censored, so certain bullies create the impression that theirs is the last word.
I've put myself up for election before yet I've never, ever been so disappointed. Just as Venezuela's crisis is now seen as a risk to all their neighbours, the credibility of elections and membership status is a risk to confidence throughout the world of free software. It has already happened in Linux Foundation and FSFE and now we see it happening in Debian.
In student politics, I was on the committee that managed a multi-million dollar budget for services in the union building and worked my way up to become NUS ambassador to Critical Mass, paid to cycle home for a year and sharing an office with one of the grand masters of postal voting: Voters: 0, Cabals: 1.
Ironically, the latter role is probably more relevant to the skills required to lead a distributed organization like Debian. Critical Mass rides have no leader at all.
When I volunteered to be FSFE Fellowship representative, I faced six other candidates. On the first day of voting, I was rear-ended by a small van, pushed several meters along the road and thrown off a motorbike, half way across a roundabout. I narrowly missed being run over by a bus.
It didn't stop me. An accident? Russians developing new tactics for election meddling? Premonition of all the backstabbings to come? Miraculously, the Fellowship still voted for me to represent them.